I currently have a MacBook Pro, and besides technically being a great laptop, the battery life (in my opinion) is really bad, around 2.5hrs. I talk to other mobile friends and aparently this is the norm. Norm or not, I don’t consider a computer “mobile” until I can take it somewhere and use it for atleast 4 hours, preferably 5, and anything over 5 just makes my eyes sparkle with happiness.

Alot of comments I’ve gotten recently are “So what, just take your charger with you”, well if I always need to be within 2′ of an electrical outlet, it’s not really a mobile solution anymore, so this doesn’t cut it.

The laptop I’ve been looking at replacing my MacBook Pro is the ThinkPad T60 with the 9-cell battery. I’ve been all over the web trying to find information about the battery life on it and here is what I have so far (times are linked to the reviews the info came from, rating in parens rating the battery life is my own qualification):

Can someone help me out here? The last test uses the Intel integrated crap-graphics and show 3D scores of like 5fps in 2-year old games, but almost 8 hours of battery life? In their “most typical web browsing tests with ‘Max Battery Life’ setting” the laptop eeked out just under 9 hours! That is absolutely incredible. Let’s look at the differences:

Reviews #1, #2, #3 use the 2.0Ghz Core Duo chip

Reviews #1, #2, #3 use the ATI X1400 Graphics Chip

Reviews #1, #2, #3 use the 15″ 1400×1050 Screen

And the reason Review #4 got such insanely high scores seem to be:

Review #4 uses the integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950

Review #4 uses the 1.83 Core Duo chip

Review #4 uses the 14.1″ 1400×1050 Screen

So cutting .17Ghz off the speed of your chip, 0.9 inches off the screen (keeping the same resolution) and using the integrated Intel graphics chip means you get in the ballpark of 2 more hours out of your laptop battery? Sign me up!

I would probably order the T60 setup like Review #4 right now if I didn’t have concerns for both the Core 2 Duo chips which aparently don’t use anymore power than the current series and are even faster and additionally the inability of the Intel graphics chipset to do any 3D at all; I would like the option atleast to run Vista on my laptop when it comes out, even though it probably won’t be laptop friendly until after the first 1 or 2 major service pack releases and OEMs have more than a year with it to port over all their utilities (unless that’s been happening in the background?).

Either way, the first review really made me want to pass on the entire idea, but the 3 other reviews really made me want to get the ThinkPad T60, but then #4 made me nervous again because those numbers are just rediculously high… atleast from what I’m experiencing with mobile computing in general.

If anyone had any input or comments on this I’d love to hear them. I’m sort of in the dark right now and done all the research I can, short of buying it. (Digg this)

The T60 comes in different configurations. The ones with the internal graphic card (GMA950) last about 2 hours more then those with the external graphic card (ATI X1300), both with a 6 cell battery. Other factors is processor size (power usage), Ram (more is better, less use of harddisc), battery size and screen brightness. Hope this helps.

Erik,
You are exactly right. After doing quite a bit more research (before getting my T60) I found just what you said, getting the integrated graphics will extend battery life considerably and then of course the monitor is the 2nd biggest change (getting the super high rest 1600×1200 monitor in the T60p for example shortens battery life by up to almost 3 hours in bad cases).

Unfortunately the integrated Intel graphics chip is so incredbily bad at performance that the highest resolution you can push the monitor at is 1024×768… which may not be bad for some folks. As a software developer it was a bit of a problem for me.

I ended up getting a T60 w/ 9 cell and Ultrabay battery. With conservative power saving setting and monitor on the lowest settings I can get 8 hours, if I turn of brightness to about 3/4 (working in a well lit environment) and am programming (lots of CPU activity) I get about 5hours. Overall a decent spread considering I was comming from 2hrs 30mins from the MacBook Pro.

I have had bad experiences of T60 batteries. I had to replace ultrabay battery about 2 months from purchase, and now the new is going broken too (50% capacity left after 4 months of replacement). The main battery has also gone bad, it can take 35Wh charge of its original 56Wh capacity.

Pekka,
I had exactly the same experience. The ultra-bay batteries, interestingly enough, are Sony batteries while the 9-cell are Fujitsu. The Ultra-bay are *trash*… I got a full replacement after 2 months, and after another 3 months it was already down below 1/2 charge capacity. They are completely pointless to get.

I have been using my T60 for about a year and a half and the original 9-cell battery is still showing 78 watt-hours after the last fuel gauge reset. I still get close to 5 hours doing pretty extensive programming…although i do keep the display turned down as far as possible. the display setting makes a huge difference on run time. i design notebook and tablet computers and there are a few things you can do to get maximum life from your batteries. to get long life, never charge the batteries above about 96-97%. keeping them always charged to 100% will significantly shorten battery life and the last few % do not significantly affect run time. this is just a characteristic of li-ion cells. the ultra bay battery is a li-polymer cell. the li-poly cells have much shorter life spans than the li-ion cells, particularly if they are kept warm, which they would be buried under the tablet. for the same price you can buy another 9-cell battery and get much more bang for the buck.

I’m vastly skeptical about any battery claims. I have an X60 which is a much lighter model than the T series. Admittedly I’m running linux so its possible that some of the energy saving features that would be active with windows aren’t.

However, I get 2 hours of battery life on the double size 8 or 9 cell battery and 1 hour of battery life on the normal 4 cell. And this is with web surfing and a screen dimmed to the point of being hard on the eyes.

The claims of 11 hours for the 9 cell… I say divide by 4. And if you’re doing anything intensive…

bit late but you are way off peter, you’ve been done in pretty bad by linux.

the x60 easily does 5 hours+ on battery saving mode with 8 cells.
you only beat it down to below 3 hours if you start doing cpu intensive things.

if you are already dimming the lcd, you’ve been screwed by linux, it must be spewing hot air out the side right? that is ac mode, it doesn’t matter if the lcd is dimmed if the cpu is running full tilt!!

I totally agree… I ended up getting a T60 with the 9-cell main battery and 3-cell ultrabay battery… what a load of junk that battery is.

After 2 months I got IBM to replace the 3-cell because I was already getting “50% charge capacity” warnings, and after 3 more months on the replacement, got the warnings again — no surprise, it’s a Sony battery.

If I have everything charged up to max and use the computer for web browsing, email and just doc stuff I’ll probably get 3hrs, if I do software development or wtach a movie… forget it.

From Phil’s message, I conclude one should never run the computer plugged in with the battery charged? My original T60 battery is down to 10 minute capacity after less than 8 months of use, most of it plugged in with the battery at full capacity. That’s just wrong. I’ve heard warnings against the effect of charge-discharge cycles on Li-ion batteries due to restructuring which occurs during each cycle: a charge-discharge cycle fails to return the battery to the original state. This implies a full discharge + full charge may be a bad thing, but keeping it fully charged shouldn’t cause any problems. On the other hand, I have used it unplugged for on order an hour, then fully recharged it, many times (train commute, when I can’t get a seat with a plug).

My Sony T-60 battery is dated October 2006, and is now down below my critical 45 minute life threshold for me to work during my Caltrain commute without a wall-plug connection. What do folks recommend for a replacement? I’m worried about anonymous ebay deals or Fry’s Electronics specials because batteries are so perishable.

Good question — we get a lot of spam posts here for battery stores (I think np-20s is just that) — but my limited experience with eBay for antiquated ThinkPad parts have been OK from high-rated sellers. I replaced the T61 keyboard recently and got a brand new one off eBay from a dealer selling OEM parts… I’d probably just go back there for a T60 battery.

I know there are other replacements out there that fit… have you tried googling? Anything at NewEgg?

It’s easy to find replacements…. I’m just afraid of stuff which wouldn’t pass Lenovo quality control which will be toast in 3 months. For example, it was reported here the Sony batteries are “trash” — certainly consistent with my experience. The value in a battery is proportional to how many charge-discharge cycles you get out of it before it degrades to a critical threshold, so it’s hard to compare on price alone.

My MacBook Pro lasts as long as 9 hours per charge. If I do a lot of downloading & use the DVD player, etc., then it doesn’t last as long, but it doesn’t last less than 5 or 6 hours, minimally. I’m quite pleased with it & wonder what the average times are for the Thinkpad?

I’m looking into purchasing a T60p (note the p) with a 15″ FlexView (1600×1200 IPS) screen. What’s the highest-capacity battery available (I’ve heard of a T4x with a 12-cell) and what’s the best manufacturer for long life and charge? Also, is there only one UltraBay battery type or are there multiple? I’d like to get 6-7 hours total out of this, and basically want simply the best batteries available.

I’d also like to know how heavier/lighter the UltraBay battery is compared to the optical drive.

I don’t know much about the after-market batteries, but the biggest ones Lenovo are offering at the 9-cell main battery and then the 3-cell ultrabay battery. In my limited experience, the 9-cell main battery was made by Fujitsu and was fantastic, the ultra-bay battery was made by Sony and after 3 months it was already down to 65% charge capacity, so I had Lenovo replace it with a new one, in 4 months that one was down to 70% charge capacity… they are junk.

The good news is that was about 3 years ago, so hopefully they’ve moved to different manufacturing techniques now.

With full charge though, all 12-cells of battery on “Battery” mode with a relatively dim screen I don’t think you’ll have any problem getting 5/6hrs in Windows. If you are putting Linux on it, that’s a different story — the power saving features even in the latest Kernel and latest GNOME/Ubuntu desktop are about 70% of what a tweaked out Lenovo Windows install will give you. Atleast in my experience.

Oh, and an important detail: I will be replacing the disk with a solid-state drive, which uses about 5% of the (admittedly quite small) power usage of a hard disk. Still, that + disabling the CD drive and instead having the UltraBay should at least get me 5 hours, I think.

Thanks for the information, Riyad. The Ultrabay battery might be bad, but since I’m getting the p model and the IPS screen, it’s probably worth it just to eke out that extra battery life. After all, that graphics card uses quite a bit of power and the higher-PPI, IPS screen too. (Was your 5/6 hours figure for a regular-screen non-p, or?)

I will indeed be using mainly Linux, and I agree that the out-of-the-box power settings aren’t up to snuff, but I know my way around and know someone with a power-usage-tuned R500, so I can almost certainly match or beat the Windows life. GNOME’s default brightness changer just changes the colour of the pixels and not the backlight strength on T60s, I think, which is really stupid and might account for a good portion of that 30%.

Yes exactly right, I had the non-P/regular screen and normal ATI 1400 accelerator, not the higher-end one in the p-laptops, I read it drew more power and I didn’t want that (no gaming needed).

I imagine turning on the powersaving features for the ATI card probably helps minimize that difference in power consumption though.

If you *do* get 5-6 hours on Linux on that machine, please come back here and tell me how… I spent about a week tweaking services, hdparm settings, CPU/core scaling settings, fan settings… just about everything and couldn’t crack 3hrs with Ubuntu 9.04. Spent quite a bit of time doing whatever thinkwiki.com told me

Damn are you serious about the GNOME brightness manager? That could have been the problem the whole time, not a single tutorial I read said that, but it would make a lot of sense. Thanks for the input!

Hmm… underclocking the graphics chip in the p when not needed should help (I might not even need the p; not sure), but up there you said that the IPS display could shorten battery life by three hours, which is yikes! On the other hand, IPS really does blow TN out of the water, and 1600×1200 is definitely nice.

Yep, I’m serious about the brightness setting; ridiculous, isn’t it? Another thing to try is to tell HAL not to poll your CD drive; unless you have a newer CD drive that supports disc detection without polling, it’ll be asking it if it has a CD often. Boy, hardware and software sure aren’t made to get along…

Ok, get the IPS screen — I don’t really care how much battery it uses, but the TN screen (I guess that’s the one I have?) is so dim it’s unusable outside on a normal day… not even bright, and not even direct sunlight… just a typical day, maybe slightly overcast… sitting at a starbuck, it’s impossible to see the screen.

I have a co-worker with the T60p that has the same screen and *hates* it.

I’m a little late on this topic but I’ve had a T60p and I was getting about 4-5 hrs of life of course I had ATI FireGL graphics and also a core Duo 2.33. After about a year or so it went down to about 3 or less hours. I then began getting battery errors saying an irreparable damage had occurred to my battery and I should replace it. Well exactly a week after my 3 year warranty had run out my battery completely died and wouldn’t take a charge.

Even within the 1 year warranty of my laptop the battery was not covered, though it was giving that error. Right now I am using it without a battery although it seems the batteries are cheap now on the bay and I’ll maybe purchase 2. The laptop is strong and runs like a champ aside from the paint on the top cover of the laptop showing slight signs of usage (slight scratches and fading) and the touchpad it looks brand new and still works great. This January it’ll be 4 years old.

Also your batter life depends on what you do with the laptop. Ie on Win XP If I was just doing word processing I teneded to get higher battery life than when I was surfing the net via wi-fi or watching a DVD or playing a 3D game. The more CPU intensive the task the higher battery drainage.

Just to leave some additional feedback. I have a W500 Thinkpad with a huge screen resolution 1920×1200. I just bought a 9 cells battery extension because my current one (bought 24 months ago) only lasts about 20 minutes. The just-purchased 9 cells battery (bought $125) lasts about 1h50 minutes on a full charge. And to say I bought it because I had an 11h flight in a week…
But indeed, there is a ATI Mobility Radeon 5300 in there, plus a big screen, plus a normal HD.

I had my ThinkPad for 3 years and went through 3 batteries. 2 ultra bay and 1 9-cell. It is amazing to me how low quality the Lenovo-branded batteries are (provided by a bunch of different manuf) I was also constantly disappointed in the battery life.

I got a unibody MacBook Pro a few years ago with the “10 hour” battery in it, and it lasts a solid 4-5. When it was brand new, maybe 6… it seems at anything other than the dimmest settings with no Flash or graphics going, that is the only way to get near the advertised battery life.

Oddly enough, my iPad lasts a full damn 10 hours… then again it is a much simpler OS.

In reply to my own earlier comment, and following the suggestion of a friend, I disabled the additional graphics card (ATI Radeon) in my laptop and used the default (set through the BIOS). and, with my new 9-cell battery, the battery life shot to an incredible 4h, just like that, without loss of screen resolution and with barely a few slowed down videos when playing full-screen. In the coming days I will replace the hard drive by an SSD one and see what difference that makes, too (considering the “no mobile parts” aspect of the SSD, I’m pretty sure that’s going to be great (or, let’s say, get into the 5 or 6h battery)

When it comes to ultrabay batteries, you NEED to eject them manually during discharge. I had an R60 and its battery failed in a similar fashion (it wasn’t a personal machine, and the R60 is I believe based on the T60 since they use the same batteries)..

What happens is that battery manufacturers stretch/lie about capacity by going the whole voltage spectrum. Lithium Ion batteries tend to do best from 3.7V to about 4.19V. With that one can get anywhere from 300-500 charge cycles. If say the Ultrabay battery is used until it is switched to the main it drops to about 3V. That alone gives it, at most, 200 cycles if not that.

Other than that, cycle often (weekly) and I suppose when using it as a desktop to not use a battery at all due to heat. I’ve heard Sanyo and Sony are bad batteries and Panasonic is the way to go. My X31 still lasts around 4 hours on its original battery, but then again it is a Panasonic and its battery is under the keyboard.

All I know about the iPad is that 90% of it is battery. Never used one.

I just bought a off lease think pad t60 with a 6 cell battery and I can achieve about 3hrs surfing the web. Considering the battery is used thats not that bad. Hell its much better than the Gateway laptop I had before that would last 30-45mins new.

Yeah I guess I am; on a side note the battery was manufactured by Panasonic. I remember reading about the batteries made by Panasonic were of much greater quality, but then again this could be just speculation.

My 9 cell is Sanyo and my 6 cell is Panasonic on my T60. So far time will tell whether or not which one is better. Unlike my X31 the Panasonic I have tends to subtract max capacity if the battery remains fully charged (which is more realistic but will need calibrations in the future).

On my X31 I have a 6 year old Panasonic with 375 cycles and 80% capacity (which equates to 4 out of 5 hours of light usage and 2 1/2 of heavy CPU usage). Although the battery’s microcomputer is bugged so I don’t know how reliable the cycle count is.